Inside the Outside Box

The logical objection to everything that follows is that the responsibility of IT is to provide systems; it’s someone else’s job to figure out how to use them effectively. Maybe so, but this video explains my response to that, as well as why I keep writing posts that nobody seems to pay much attention to.

Apparently it’s come ’round time to talk metrics again, because at a meeting this morning we were given a hefty stack of handouts beginning with “Managing IT as a Business” by Mark D. Lutchen. I’d link to the full article, but not surprisingly you have to pay money to read the whole thing; here’s some excerpts, which, also not surprisingly, leave out what I consider to be the most important point. You might think that I’m not a big fan of metrics but that’s not the case’; metrics matter you just have to be careful what you mean by metrics, snip:

In too many companies, IT metrics focus on operational, technical and transactional components– and whether projects are moving forward on time and within budget. Unfortunately these “shop-floor” type metrics do not, by themselves, get at the heart of what the executive team needs to know about the IT organization. In fact, because such metrics often look good on paper, they actually may be masking problems.

To achieve consistently high performance and value, executives need to be able to measure how effectively the IT organization is positioning itself to be used by its constituents as a driver of business value.

So, as a University what exactly is our business value? The top-level answer is research, teaching, and learning, though not necessarily in that order. But let’s tip the iceberg; all our business depends on attracting and retaining good faculty and good students, and of course turning the latter into a loyal and generous alumni. So the question is how does IT further those values?

Attachment five in the morning’s hand outs was a list of metric suggestions from Chris Gill at Gonzaga University. I’m just going to use Gill’s main topics and add my comments, so you’ll need to switch back and forth or split the screen if you want to follow what’s going on.

• Support Center (Help Desk)– I should probably just leave this alone, but my position is that we should aim to build systems so simple and so stable that we can pretty much eliminate the need for a help desk. The rest of Gill’s items don’t have much to do with what I think of the support center.
• Personal Computers– Currently I’d guess about 1.5 computer for each student, faculty, and staff member; that might be a little low and of course it doesn’t include PDAs, iPhone’s, etc. In other words, these are not machines we own, but rather the juggernaut we’re trying to survive.
• Central Systems—Yup.
• Network– Yup again.
• Academic– Of the seven listed items the first five are quantitative measurements of the LMS system that is assumed to be in place. Now  that assumption should tell us something about how central technology has become to the core mission of the University. However, limiting the academic importance of technology to an LMS or smart classroom uptime misses a great deal of what is, or at least should be, going on.
• Web– What troubles me here is that there seems to be an assumption of “a” Web. Maybe I’m just reading wrong, but the list doesn’t seem to begin to capture the complexity of the web environment at the average University.
• General/Other– surveys are not the only way to capture user attitude or experience, and in fact they’re one of the least reliable methods for doing so. Word-of-mouth is increasingly an online phenomenon; see Web and Support Center above.

I’m not suggesting that this is a bad list, in fact it’s a very good one; it’s just a very incomplete one. It tells us a lot about things, but not very much about how people use things, or about how they feel about using them, or how rapidly they are discovering new ways to use these things to improve the processes of learning, teaching, etc.

Maybe I’m blogging a dead horse here, maybe this has nothing to do with us, and we should leave it to the executive decision team. Maybe it’s not our job to change things, or my job to suggest that we should try, but then again, look at the alternative.

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